Thursday, 24 December 2015

Hey there, online stalkers!Fancy a sneaky glimpse into the seasonal activities of the “so-called” great
and good?They don’t just disappear
because we stop giving a tinker’s cuss about them for 24 hours, you know.

So, with thanks to Mr Capaldi for the loan of his Tardis,
let’s zip across the timeline and see what everybody’s planning to get up to
once they’ve finished unwrapping Santa’s goodies…

Alistair Carmichael
MP (oh, how that appellation grates) will take delivery of 365 pairs of flame-retardant
underpants, which should last him a whole year as long as he only speaks once a
day.Needless to say, he’ll add the cost
to his legal fees claim, itemised as “briefs”.

Kezia Dugdale will
spend the day gazing at the Forth Road Bridge, wearing her disappointed face.

Gary Robertson,
whose pre-Christmas Good Morning Scotland
conversation with Derek is destined to be an online classic, will spend the day
spitting rivets.In an ironic twist, the
folk working on the Forth Road Bridge will find these extremely helpful.Merry Christmas, Gary!

David Torrance will
publish a new unauthorised biographical work, Derek McKay: My Part In His Downfall, written in the space of 20
minutes and based on Wikipedia, a couple of random Tweets and the advice of a gypsy
crone. The Waterstones price of “we’ll give you 50p to take the damn thing away”
will ensure a few sales, albeit mostly in households where one table leg is
shorter than the other three.

Donald Trump will
launch his personal brand of eau de cologne, Trump Mist, produced by bottling his farts. He’ll then order a drone strike on Trumpton
for image rights theft and disassociate himself from Nellie the Elephant on the
grounds that she’s a “stoopid broad”.Finally,
as his approval ratings soar higher than Jackie Bird’s left eyebrow, he’ll hurl
insults at the crew of the International Space Station because he’s run out of
targets on Earth.

John Swinney will
find a 5p piece in his Christmas pudding and miraculously use it to dual the
A9, put fairy lights on the Queensferry Crossing and get started on an oil
fund.

Jackie Baillie
will swallow the 5p and claim that by not spending it on any of the Swinney
items she somehow has 10p, which can be used to offset George Osborne’s
non-existent tax credit clawbacks, end world hunger, fund a mission to Mars and
still leave enough to buy five magic beans.

Willie Rennie will
call for an enquiry after he breaks his tooth on the 5p in his Christmas
pudding, his greetin’ face turns all the satsumas sour and the joke in his
cracker turns out to be a final demand for £800,000 from Police Scotland.

Tricia Marwick, Holyrood’s
Presiding Officer, will delightedly unwrap a brand new light-sabre sent by
the makers of Star Wars, who have witnessed
her numpty-skewering powers with awe and want to offer her a part in the next
movie as a galactic referee.

James Kelly MSP
will consolidate his reputation as the worst player of Musical Chairs in the
history of the human race.His excuse of
being unable to sit down because he can’t find his arse with both hands will,
as usual, fail to impress the panel of 6-year-old judges.

David Cameron’s present
of a boar’s head sporran will be the talk of Chipping Norton.

Jeremy Corbyn will
ruin the whole occasion no matter what he does.If he doesn’t issue a festive message he’ll be cancelling Christmas, and
if he does he’ll be behaving like flaming Royalty.If he puts on a Santa outfit he’ll be
brazenly wearing the Red Flag and offering something for nothing, and if he
doesn’t he’ll be a humourless wonk who enjoys crushing little children’s dreams.If he protests to IPSO he’ll be a gutless
coward, and if they find in his favour the Sun
will print a retraction so tiny that bacteria can trample it underfoot.

Blairite conspirators
in the Parliamentary Labour Party will exchange anti-Corbyn messages hidden
in mince pies and look forward to the day when they can knife Jeremy in the
front, back, side and soles of his feet, before relaunching Labour as the
acronym Tony always intended it to be: Loosely Assembled Bunch Of Unprincipled
Ratbags.

Iain Duncan Smith will
feel an eerie chill gnawing at the fabric of his being.But don’t worry, he’ll just throw another
benefits claimant on the fire.

Iain Gray MSP
will gaze at the array of dog biscuits on the shelves of his local Morrison’s,
wondering if they do them in Golden Retriever flavour.

Alex Salmond, bored
with simply walking across Strichen Lake, will turn it into wine and serve it
to his Christmas Day guests.The Herald,
egged on by the Scotch Whisky Association, will concoct a slavering SNPBad headline
accusing him of breaching European free trade regulations.

Lawson Carjack MSP, the
Scottish Tories’ answer to Anton du Beke, will promote the lost art of dancing
by inviting Ruth Davidson to join
him in a seasonal military two-step.Unfortunately, in a fit of over-enthusiasm about the “military” part,
she’ll turn up in a tank and accidentally flatten him.He’ll be rushed to Glasgow’s Super-Duper
Hospital, where the “Bradford special” Christmas dinner will give him a massive
case of diahorrea. This, despite his injuries, will keep him dancing all night
long.

Nicola Sturgeon
will spend the day kicking ass.Hey,
it’s what she does – why should Christmas be any different?

Wednesday, 9 December 2015

Although the future is unknowable, I can offer Whining Willie
Rennie at least one guarantee: he and his morally vacuous mince-cluster of Lib
Dems will be given a comprehensive seeing-to at the 2016 Holyrood
elections.That apart, it remains to be
seen exactly what the fallout from today’s “he’s a lying scumbag, but that’s actually
legal, so shut it, Nats” Carmichael court decision will be. But what the heck, let’s give it a go.

As BBC Cringeland marks the outcome with its traditional
parade of whey-faced Unionist chortlers, and the rest of us are left resisting
the temptation to go out and uproot lamp-posts with our teeth, the immediate
priority is clear.We must support the
Orkney Four, monstered at the start of proceedings as vexatious politically
motivated agitators, and now facing the prospect of the same tedious
spittle-gauntlet again.As if
Carmichael’s smear, and his subsequent lie, weren’t “politically motivated”,
and the “political” nature of that lie wasn’t the essence of his beetroot-faced
defence!

More pressingly, stupendous as the Four’s crowd-funding total
may look, if Carmichael is awarded costs they still stand to lose everything,
including in one case the ability to pursue a career.That justice is denied to ordinary folk by being
so far out of their price range that it’s visible only to the Hubble telescope is
a disgrace, and a reminder that after independence the hard work will just be starting.For now, whatever it takes, even the
equivalent of two Wings crowd-funders in one outrageous go, we simply can’t
allow the Four to go under.

Moral victories may be as much fun as a rub-down with
caustic soda, but the quartet really do need to be commended for having the
initiative to bring this case, and the fortitude, staying power and downright
cojones to see it through. As sages such
as Lallands Peat Worrier always warned, the legal task they faced was
equivalent to attempting the world pole vault record using a garden rake.

In the event, they established, officially and on the
record, that Carmichael lied.They
forced him to display, for all the world to see, what a mediocre, evasive,
self-serving scrote he is.That the
world will doubtless turn a blind eye simply illustrates how pin-headed that
world can be, and that they failed only to prove that lying was an offence
under the Representation of the People Act just shows that the law couldn’t be
more of an ass if it were offering rides on Millport Beach.

If this were fitba’, it would be like leading 2-0 after
playing the other team off the park for 89 minutes, only to have both goals
chalked off and a last-minute penalty awarded against you because of an arcane
FIFA rule about half-time pies being insufficiently hot.It may not be an Establishment fix, but it’s
a brain-contorting legal travesty.

Justice may yet be served by a Parliamentary Standards
enquiry, in the sense that my nine-year-old niece may one day be the first
woman on Mars.But it shouldn’t even
come to that.If Carmichael were a
sensitive human being instead of a self-important fart cushion, he’d
unobtrusively take the Chiltern Hundreds and bog off to Patagonia for five
years’ rehabilitation as a goat-herder.

No such luck. As long
as he doesn’t make the mistake of standing in another election, he’s all set to
hop back aboard that well-known choo-choo, gravy-guzzling pail in hand and smug
how-jammy-am-I-mammy grin on his face. Could there be a nice furry cloak in his
future, even though sane people wouldn’t even recommend him for membership of
the Tufty Club?In a world where Alistair
Darling and Gordon Brown, the Laurel and Hardy of the indyref campaign, slide
effortlessly into sinecures in the high-powered financial shafting sector, and
wee Dougie Alexander becomes Bono’s personal sanctimony adviser, surely
anything is possible.

In the meantime, any chance of a teaspoonful of contrition from
Carmichael amongst the Desmond-style inundation of self-exculpatory guff?Nope, thanks for asking, folks, but hard
luck.

“I’ve been vindicated,” orates the
puffball, when the word he should have used is “vindictive”.“It was all a plot by the Nationalists,” he asserts,
as if he’s on the shortlist for an Iain Duncan Smith Victim-Blaming Mendacity
Award. “Scottish politics since the referendum has been so polarised,” he
whines, when he’s the one who made a pole arise, somewhat forcefully, up the
back passage of democracy.

But, hey, what do you expect now that smearing and lying has
been enshrined in law as acceptable behaviour?Enjoy the temporary gloat, Unionist scoffers who made a meal out of our “grumpiness”
this morning.One day very soon, one of
these bastards will be doing the same to you.

If you'd like to donate to the Orkney Four fund-raiser, you can access it here.

Tuesday, 24 November 2015

Apologies, readers, for the radio silence of late.Long-time followers will be aware that this
happens from time to time:I get heavily
involved in other stuff, and it takes more and more of my time until I can
hardly think straight, let alone blog anything worth reading.So here we are again!

With things now beginning to ease off, I expect to be back
in harness on To September And Beyond at
the beginning of December.My Vow, which
at least can’t be less credible than the Daily
Record version, is to produce shorter posts on a more frequent basis, which
may help me avoid running into the buffers again.And, where the subject matter demands it,
maybe there’ll be the odd post that doesn’t have quite so many jokes in it.(If the brilliant Frankie Boyle can do it….)

Anyway, please do stay tuned, and in the meantime enjoy the
hell out of the aforementioned Mr Boyle, Wee Ginger Dug, Peat Worrier, Bateman
and the many others who make the new media the effervescent joy it is.I’ll see you soon.

About Me

I'm a writer who returned to Scotland in 2013 after 30+ years in the Home Counties. If you enjoy reading my ramblings, please return often and recommend me to your friends on Twitter, Facebook and Planet Earth. That way someone may one day give me money to do this sort of thing, which would be nice.
william_duguid@hotmail.com